The Tea-Party Primary (Stephen Colbert Marco Rubio Charlie Crist

By MARK LEIBOVICH

Published: January 10, 2010

Charlie Crist's perma-tanned face bears none of the strain you would expect from the archetype of the embattled Republican. Politicians are supposed to keep up appearances, but Crist is especially convincing, one of the more earnest politicians you will see, whether or not he means it.

''Are you kidding? It would be an honor,'' the governor of Florida tells a guy wearing a kilt who had asked for a photo.

''Thank you for coming to Pensacola, Governor,'' a woman says.

''Call me Charlie,'' he insists. ''Please! Just call me Charlie. It would be an honor.''

Many things are an honor to Crist -- if they are not a ''pleasure'' or a ''privilege.'' On a chilly-for-Florida Thursday night in early December, Crist was addressing the annual Lincoln Day Dinner for the local Republican Party in the northwestern outpost of Escambia County in the Florida Panhandle -- nearly as close to Cincinnati as it is to Miami.

''God bless you here in the Panhandle, for your values,'' Crist tells the crowd.

Crist, who is 53, is a compact and sunbaked raisin of a man with a shock of white hair, a beak nose and dark Mediterranean eyes. His grandfather, a Greek immigrant, shined shoes for $5 a day in Altoona, Pa., after leaving Cyprus at age 14; his father, a family doctor, shortened the last name from Christodoulos and settled in St. Petersburg when Charlie was 4. If the Crist family owned a Greek diner, Charlie would be the ma?e d' who delivers you to your favorite table, asks about your mother and tells you to not miss the rice pudding.

The people of the Panhandle are ''the greatest people I have ever met,'' he says. He likes people, no doubt -- ''the people's governor'' is always reminding ''people'' how driven he is to help ''the people'' of Florida, in accordance with the ''will of the people'' who gave him ''the pleasure, the privilege and the honor'' to be their governor so he can ''help the people.'' As recently as last spring, Crist's standing in Florida and with Republicans nationally was as golden as his skin. But these days not all of the people are happy with Charlie Crist. And a lot of them are in his party.

To many Republicans, the governor's biggest sin was his support for the Obama administration's $787 billion economic-stimulus package. That's what comes up the most, although a fair number of conservatives also blame Crist for his seemingly decisive endorsement of John McCain three days before the Florida primary in the 2008 presidential campaign, effectively handing the state to an eventual nominee for whom many conservatives had little use. They see Crist's career as pockmarked with instances of consensus-seeking, deal-making and bipartisanship -- three particularly vulgar notions to a simmering Tea Party movement on the right. Conservatives have tagged Crist as being part of that pariah breed of Republican today: a ''moderate.'' Or worse.

''One of the most liberal politicians in the Republican firmament,'' National Review said of him. Crist's support for the stimulus bill came to embody what many on the right view as his RINO (Republican in name only) inclinations -- in, among other areas, environmental policy, judicial appointments, spending and small-government orthodoxy. That critique has blared constantly as Crist navigates a treacherous Senate race that nine months ago looked like a beach stroll.

Crist wants to fill the seat vacated in September by Mel Martinez, also a Republican. His Democratic opponent in the fall would likely be Representative Kendrick Meek. But first Crist must survive a civil war: a Republican primary fight against Marco Rubio, the 38-year-old former speaker of the Florida House who has become a cause c?bre of the national conservative movement and drew even with Crist last month in a Rasmussen poll (after trailing the governor by almost 30 percentage points over the summer). Crist has become a conservative scourge, for reasons he seems at a loss to understand and that in some ways have nothing to do with him.

It is not uncommon for a party out of power to undergo an identity crisis and an internal bloodletting, and it is Crist's bad luck that his race in 2010 fits the frame of a philosophical debate that has been fulminating in the Republican Party for several months. The race, and the national debate, pits the governing pragmatists against the ideological purists. The purists say that a Republican revival depends on hewing to conservative ideas, resisting compromise and generally taking a dim view of government. Tea Party rallies are filled with such purists, whose populist icons -- Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News's Glenn Beck -- tend to be unburdened by the pressures of governing through a recession.

Not long ago, Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, summed up the purity side this way: ''I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don't have a set of beliefs.'' And when I asked Rubio recently which current senator he most admires, he said DeMint.